I started out on a journey that would change my life forever. When my friend and I developed MwTunes, it was the first website of its kind in Malawi, and the technology we were using was far ahead of what everyone else was using, so much that it took nearly three years for the rest of the industry to catch up. That's when I knew that I wanted to design and develop more things and become one of the best at it.

Working with Computer Plus Peripherals Ltd, I got the very rare opportunity to lead the design of a website for a pretty big government entity: the Malawi Police Service. It was tough work but I gained a lot of experience designing systems in a multi-user environment and also discovered that I was good at training non-technical people on how to use technical systems.

At only six months old, Djuaji Research got accepted into Savannah Fund's prestigious accelerator - one of the best in Africa. They helped us kickstart our business with amazing training, access to resources, networks and a $30,000 investment.

The more time I spent around tech entrepreneurs in Africa, the more I understood the significance of the opportunity. Here I am talking alterative finance and blockchain with Jessica Colaço at the AfriKoin 2015 conference.

We were out of cash, and out of time. I had made the tough choice of resigning from Djuaji Research a few weeks back, but I caught a lucky break. This was my first day of work at Africa's Talking (AT).

The Malawi office wasn't going to build itself, so I packed everything I owned into a few bags and boxes and moved to Lilongwe. It was showtime. But how were we going to build an API company in one of the poorest countries in the world?

A few months later, we were making national news. APIs were becoming hot and all the biggest technology players countrywide were getting interested. I gave the keynote presentation at the ICT Association of Malawi Innovation Forum in 2017 - pointing out how fundamentally broken Malawi's ecosystem was - and all the things we could do to fix it.

Leading the International Expansion Team at Africa's Talking, we figured out how to scale into 15 African markets, including some interesting ones like South Africa, Zambia, Ethiopia and Côte d'Ivoire. With a headcount of close to 100 at AT, and over $10m in annual revenue, I figured things would be okay and it was time for me to find a new adventure.

Prior to this moment, I had spent my entire career never having seen young, Black people who are my age as leaders in technology instutitions. Maijid Moujaled and Ham Serunjogi changed that. In just under 3 years, they had built a cross-border mobile money platform with over 3.5 million users all over the continent. I joined to help figure out how to make that financial scale useful for global merchants capturing the Internet economy opportunity in Africa.